Gamocracy Dev Diary: Week Five

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We have spent the week implementing the core game mechanics. This sadly means our hero is no longer invincible, H7 can now take damage. For this we decided to use a mechanic similar to the one suggested by DeadBrainPL in his first week entry ‘Loki’. Basically it is the tried and proven mechanic from sonic the hedgehog where the player has a chance to collect lost life (energy in our case) after being hit. Since DeadBrainPL was the first one to suggest this mechanic he will be credit for the idea (is “director of pain” a good enough title?).

Since H7 is an alien robot we went with an undefined type of energy (hardtogettium?) as our life currency. Currently one unit is always lost when taking damage (the rest are spawned as crystals). This number might change when we get in to testing our maps.

We also decided to get a bit creative with the energy and added some game mechanics of our own (we couldn’t just sit back and let you have all the fun). The first thing we did was to design three different “surveillance” enemies. These are pretty easy enemies that we mostly use to restrict how the player can move around on the map, but they also double as pickups when you have the magnet hand. Each enemy drops a differently colored “orb” when they die. These orbs can be picked up with the magnet and then be launched as different projectiles (functionality depending on orb color).

We also added an “energy overdrive” which is activated once H7 has more then 6 units of energy. In this mode he starts to glow and his abilities are improved.

His head bounce is significantly higher (we let the player decide what height by only doing this when the player is pressing the jump button while bouncing). The magnet hand can tractor the smaller “surveillance” units, which will then turn into their respective “orb”, removing the need to kill the enemy.

We are also considering a “charge” ability which would allow H7 to run very fast (and possibly through destructible walls) when being in “overdrive” mode.

We now feel that we have enough tools to shift our focus to building the final levels. How we are doing this was supposed to be explained in this week’s video diary. However, it turns out that David explaining collisiondetection schemes and cache optimizing is about as entertaining as it sounds. So we spared you!

We would also like to point people to this week’s challenge, which is to come up with a killer name for the game!

Well I just want to try the game as soon as possible ;-) Because it just looks so cool, and the game really starts to look like something really great…

I really like the way you changed H7 into a really unique character, with all that moves he can do to progress through the levels.

The levels design sounds very cool, but did you thought about a night/day cycle for the city levels ? The fact is that in the jungle levels, I think it’s always dark or lightless, because of the trees, but in the city it could be great to have that kind of change, with the enemies having a change of colour, from that red colour to some fluo colour… Well it’s just an idea, but also, why not let the city streets with a daylight and put that fluo-coloured enemies in the Underground level ?

You’re doing really good work you guys, and it’s always a pleasure to read those dev diaries, in order to see how well done the things are…And let’s look for a good name for this enjoying minis…